Silicon Valley tech companies donate fortunes to left-wing politicians. Could this be why Democrats are so hesitant to regulate them?
Last week, The New York Times revealed that Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) pressured Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) to back off of investigating the company:
Back off, he told Mr. Warner, according to a Facebook employee briefed on Mr. Schumer’s intervention. Mr. Warner should be looking for ways to work with Facebook, Mr. Schumer advised, not harm it. Facebook lobbyists were kept abreast of Mr. Schumer’s efforts to protect the company, according to the employee.
But Senator Schumer’s relationship with Facebook seems to show a conflict of interest. His daughter, Alison Schumer, has been employed by Facebook since 2017, according to her LinkedIn profile. Last April a conservative-leaning artist made public posters proclaiming “Conflict of Interest? The daughter of Chuck is working for Zuck.”
Facebook’s leadership has been donating to Senator Schumer for years. As noted by the New York Post:
Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave the senator $5,200 in 2013.
Sheryl Sandberg, the company’s high-profile chief operating officer, kicked in $5,400 – the maximum legal amount – to Schumer’s 2016 re-election campaign.
Facebook general counsel Colin Stretch gave the same sum in 2015.
Newly appointed board member Kenneth Chenault has been a loyal Schumer supporter since 1995. Most recently, he gave $1,200 to the senator’s 2016 primary election campaign and $2,700 in that year’s general election. Chenault has contributed a total of $6,900.
In The Post, MSNBC Republican and political strategist Susan Del Percio commented: “This is an industry that’s been trying for years to fend off heavy government regulation by actively cultivating relationships with senators and House members.”
According to the records published on OpenSecrets.org, Facebook employees have contributed over $30,000 to Chuck Schumer in recent years.
These revelations emerge at a time when Facebook and tech in general have come under scrutiny from the right for suppressing conservative views, and from the left for being unhealthily addictive as “cigarettes” as well as unethical use of consumer data.
Gizmodo reported that former facebook employees confessed accounts of suppressing conservative stories while amplifying left-wing narratives, one such employee noted, “Depending on who was on shift, things would be blacklisted or trending, I’d come on shift and I’d discover that CPAC or Mitt Romney or Glenn Beck or popular conservative topics wouldn’t be trending because either the curator didn’t recognize the news topic or it was like they had a bias against Ted Cruz.”
